Things are not going well for Democrats. Riding high just weeks ago after Republicans shut down the government, the party now finds itself in a swoon: President Obama’s ratings have hit an all-time low. The implementation of healthcare reform remains a mess. Vulnerable Democrats are scrambling to distance themselves from the White House, and the party is on track to lose seats in the House and Senate next year.

Parties in distress tend to fall to bickering, and today’s Democrats are no exception. On one side, liberals calling for a muscular agenda of government expansion and progressive taxation; on the other, centrists who believe restraint is necessary in both policy and politics. Progressives have been emboldened by liberal victories like that of the new mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio. Centrists fear that liberals will drive the party out of the American mainstream with their talk of income redistribution and political correctness.

In the post-Obama era and without an incumbent on the ticket, “Where does the party go?” Jon Cowan, president of the centrist think tank Third Way, asked me. “I think that is going to be an incredibly heated debate.”

No one is saying Democrats are tipping into the kind of civil war that has riven the GOP. But the split is likely to worsen as the party confronts its future, complicating Democratic prospects in the 2014 midterm elections and coming to the fore in the 2016 primaries.

“There is a very large faction within the Democratic Party that wants to go back in time. They want to re-unionize the entire country.”

“When we focus on economic mobility, that’s a conversation that unites us,” Jack Markell, the popular two-term Delaware governor and a self-styled centrist, told me. “If it’s about inequality, it’s a conversation that has the potential of dividing us.” Markell says that middle-class voters hear in the crusade against “inequality” a desire to equalize people rather than make everyone better off.

In de Blasio’s resounding win and the burgeoning celebrity of Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, many have seen a new flowering of liberalism. Peter Beinart, writing in The Daily Beast in September, argued that the Millennial generation, accustomed to diversity and fired by a sense of economic injustice, is pushing the electorate leftward. The New York Times and The New Republic have both portrayed Warren, with her calls for expanding entitlements and cracking down on Wall Street, as a counterpoint to the cautious centrism of Hillary Clinton.

Stan Greenberg, a longtime Democratic pollster who advised de Blasio’s campaign, insists that most Democrats, including Obama, are on the same page as Warren. In both presidential elections, he noted, “Obama ran on a future for the middle class of restoring prosperity, raising taxes on the wealthy, and an investment agenda. That’s the mainstream of the Democratic Party; it’s the mainstream of the country.”

But the trumpeting of a new progressive era triggers traumatic flashbacks for the Democratic warriors of a previous generation. They remember the party’s many years of nominating liberal candidates like Walter Mondale—and losing badly. So the centrists recently fired back. In a December 2 Wall Street Journal op-ed, Cowan and another Third Way official argued that “populism” was a dead end for Democrats. They urged the party to demonstrate fiscal responsibility by embracing entitlement reform.

“There is a very large faction within the Democratic Party that wants to go back in time,” Cowan told me. “They want to take what we did in the 20th century and do more of it. They want to re-unionize the entire country, unwind the trade deals of the last couple of decades, and not just preserve but expand entitlements. Even if we could afford that, it wouldn’t solve most of the problems of the middle class.”

The backlash to the Cowan op-ed was swift and forceful. The next day, Warren wrote a letter to several banks asking them to disclose their donations to think tanks that was widely seen as a swipe at Third Way, though it didn’t mention the group explicitly. Progressives called on Democratic officeholders to repudiate the op-ed, which many did, and to cut their ties to Third Way, which most did not. The liberal group MoveOn.org released a television ad responding to Third Way’s criticism and pointedly aired it only in the Washington, D.C., market. “Third Way and many of the Beltway insiders it works to influence are simply out of touch with the American public on Social Security,” MoveOn’s Ilya Sheyman said.

Progressive groups would like to play the role in the Democratic Party that the Tea Party plays in the GOP, forcing elected officials to stake out less moderate positions in order to win party primaries. But when groups like MoveOn and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee have campaigned in the past decade for liberal candidates and against moderates in contested party primaries, they have mostly lost. In the most high-profile recent example of a centrist Democrat challenged from the left, unions tried and failed to oust moderate Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln, who, damaged by the bruising and expensive primary, went on to lose the general election to a Republican.

Lincoln's defeat was unusual. More often, ideologically driven liberal candidates simply lose primaries without posing a threat to Democratic officeholders. As a result, it’s not clear which Democratic faction has the heart of the base. In the 1980s and '90s, the party was controlled by liberal special interests and labor bosses, but Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council won by understanding that the Democratic rank and file was largely moderate. (In this, the Democrats are structurally different from the GOP, whose rank and file is overwhelmingly conservative.) The Democratic primary of 2008 may have been bruising and divisive, but it largely revolved around personality and style, not ideology.

Both factions tend to claim Obama, whose signature is a combination of conciliatory policy tactics and broadly progressive goals. Liberals note that on December 4, just two days after the Third Way op-ed came out, Obama gave a major speech calling for new action on income inequality. Centrists counter that Obama has agreed in principle to entitlement reforms.

The tangled legacy Obama will leave his party underlies many of the current disagreements raging within the Democratic coalition. The populist-centrist split, which revolves around how much taxes ought to rise on the wealthy and whether Social Security and Medicare benefits ought to be curtailed, is only the beginning. Education reform is another point of contention: Teachers unions loathe the pro-charter-school policies embraced by Obama’s education department and many Democratic elites. Obama’s tough approach to national security and civil liberties has alienated many of the progressives who supported him as an antiwar candidate in 2008; his abortive push for intervention in Syria began the slide in his approval rating that continues today. Environmentalists continue to pressure the administration not to approve the Keystone XL pipeline. Important Democratic constituencies such as Latinos and unions feel badly let down by the Obama presidency and are kept in the tent only by the conviction that Republicans are even worse.

“My advice is to get a grip,” says Howard Dean. “There’s nothing voters dislike more than cowering. We should punch back.”

Most Democrats assume that, given the electorate’s increasing diversity and Republican dysfunction, the party still has a winning hand—and they may be right. If Hillary Clinton seeks the party’s nomination, she might go virtually unopposed, her effortless coronation obviating any divisive intra-party debates. So much for the great Democratic soul-searching.

“It’s the usual inside-the-Beltway panic by the Democrats,” Howard Dean, the progressive former Vermont governor and former Democratic National Committee chairman, told me. “My advice is to get a grip. There’s nothing voters dislike more than cowering. We should punch back.”

The party’s current doldrums, and the prospect of a spate of losses next year, have some party leaders warning Democrats not to get complacent. Even the most bullish Obama supporters acknowledge that the party cannot afford to take its current advantages for granted. “I don’t think we should move forward with a false sense of security that Republicans are so out of the mainstream that they could never win,” Obama strategist David Axelrod told me. “It behooves the Democratic Party to continue to advance new ideas.”

Last month, Democrat Terry McAuliffe won the Virginia gubernatorial election, a low-turnout contest the president's party traditionally loses. Despite being an imperfect candidate, McAuliffe succeeded in painting his opponent, Ken Cuccinelli, as an extreme Tea Party ideologue. Democrats pointed to his victory as proof that conservative Republicans continue to alienate swing-state voters.

But on the same day, Republican Governor Chris Christie was resoundingly reelected in New Jersey, seeming to prove that a charismatic personality who repudiates the extremes of the national GOP can appeal to crossover voters and avoid the taint of the Republican brand. To some Democrats, Christie’s victory was a warning not just of a potentially formidable Christie presidential candidacy but of the difficulties Democrats could face if Republicans get their act together.

“They’re the stupid party now,” Al From, the founder of the now-defunct DLC, warned in a recent speech. “But they’re not going to be stupid forever.” If Republicans manage to mend the current rifts that so help their opponents and unite behind a candidate with broad appeal, a Democratic Party already on the rocks could find itself in serious trouble.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.